Lomborg and the Litany of Biodiversity Crisis: What the Peer-Reviewed Literature Says

Abstract:  Lomborg's (2001) book has generated passionate discussion about the state of the global environment. We performed a bibliometric evaluation of the peer-reviewed primary scientific literature to determine whether there is any consistent evidence that "things are getting better." The global literature primarily reported negative impacts on biodiversity caused by human actions, although Europe appeared to be doing better than the rest of the world. These results cannot be explained by publication bias alone because rejection rates of papers indicating improvements in the environment would have to be unrealistically high to change our results. There were nonrandom distributions of papers showing environmental recovery in developed countries and for ecosystems not strongly subjected to conservation-development conflicts. Although the literature did not paint a picture of universal gloom, the empirical evidence clearly showed growing environmental crises.